Meetings and Allergies
…are putting the hammer down on me today. I’ll do my best, but may have to pick up with buttercreams on Monday.
READ ONLife Among the Philistines
As I mentioned in my morning’s post, a lot of people have historically had trouble making true buttercreams at home. The upshot of that has been that starting roughly thirty years ago, home bakers pretty much quit trying to make them altogether. The tragedy of that is that nowadays most people don’t have the faintest […]
READ ONJoe’s Mail Bag
My good friend Mexico Bob writes in to ask: On the CBS Early Show this morning a man said that in every cake and cookie recipe that you make involving white flour you should add a teaspoon of Cardamom. What’s this all about? Is it something that we might use in a Danish? Funny you […]
READ ONSo then…buttercream
There’s a reason I’ve held out for as long as I have on the subject of buttercream: it’s an almost impossibly broad topic. There are a gazillion different recipes for buttercream out there, and each one, it seems, has a professional baker or cake maker standing behind it proclaiming it’s the best. Me, I’m not […]
READ ONHey all you aspiring TV chefs…
The Food Network sent me a press release announcing that there will soon be casting calls for the The Next Food Network Star. Go to www.foodnetwork.com/star if you’re interested, just promise me that if you do go all the way and get your show, you won’t let me down by making wimpy caramel.
READ ONSugar, water, heat.
A good question came in today about caramel making. Specifically: why add water to the sugar at the outset of the caramel making process when you’re just going to evaporate it all out anyway? The reason is to protect the sugar from heating up too fast and burning. True, that’s what we want to get […]
READ ONDelicious Destruction
When Mrs. Pastry got home from her late class last evening she went, in characteristic style, straight over to the caramel pan and stuck her nose in. “Wow, what’s in here?” she asked in reaction to the rich, floral odors the dark caramel gave off. “Nothing but sugar,” I said, “with cream added afterward to […]
READ ONThe Art of Darkness
Now THAT’s what I call a caramel sauce. Deep dark and lip-smackingly bitter-sweet. Perfect for a home-made caramel ice cream or a batch of caramel-pumpkin bars. Of course not everybody likes their caramel this dark and smoky. To me, though, those people are nuts. Of course nobody’s saying you have to cook yours this long. […]
READ ONMaking Bakery Napalm
Knock-out sticky buns, apple tarts and caramel ice creams cannot exist without knock-out caramel and/or caramel sauce. Or so sayeth…well, me. Too many pastry makers treat it as a detail, unworthy of serious scrutiny (especially some conspicuous folks on TV). That’s a cup of sugar and a quarter cup of water swirled over high heat […]
READ ONMea culpa
Yours truly has been coming under quite a bit of fire lately for the way I use — or don’t use — recipes. Specifically, that I talk about spreading “some brown sugar” here, “some caramel” there and don’t give exact quantities (to say nothing of recipes or visual instructions). What can I say? My background […]
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